SEO & SEM

Search Engine Placement

This term gets thrown around quite a bit these days. There is no such thing as "Placing your site above other sites". What most people are referring to is the natural building of a website with content that is relevant to their target audience.

Search Engine Optimization

This is probably a better term for this field of marketing. This is the process of improving a websites relevance in the eyes of search engines. A lot of different companies use hundreds of techniques to accomplish this. Many of these companies are very reasonable in their pricing. The main question is "Do they get results?" Most of the time, they choose search terms to help you with that have very little competion or are relatively easy to produce results for. Unfortunately this does not always capture the greatest amount of potential customers.

Here is a good example:

I had a company offer to get one of my clients, a coin company, first page results on Google for the term "Coin Values"

This would have brought thousands of visitors to the site. But, most of the people searching for "Coin Values" are not looking to buy coins, they are looking for the value of their coins. This would have also been a disaster as far as the number of phone calls the company would have gotten with little potential for sales.

What I did:

By getting to know the company and spending time in their work environment, I was able to come up with a list of 20-30 specific products or product categories to focus on. By coming up on the first page of Google for these specific products, we were targeting shoppers who were specifically searching for that product. Not to mention the fact that they were looking for a reliable source to get these coins from on a monthly/yearly basis.

What Can You Do?

The main thing that any business owner can begin to do to prepare to jump into the world of Internet Marketing is to familiarize themselves with their competion and where they are focusing their efforts online.

Sometimes it's better to let other peoples experience in trial and error lead the way for your marketing campaign. Don't get me wrong, I love to blaze new trails in marketing.....but some battles have already been fought and lost by other people. Why go there.